Tag: memory

Good enough is not bad at all, or, Book Bus Stories: this year it’s a zine

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A stack of photocopied A3 paper covered in dense handwritten text. Some sheets have been folded down into A6 booklets.

Last year, Book Bus Stories was an exhibition. Next year, it might finally be a book. But this year, it’s a zine.

I haven’t been writing much in recent months; you may have seen how quiet I’ve been over here and guessed that it reflects a prolonged period of literary inactivity offline. I haven’t had much time, I haven’t had much energy, and, if I’m honest, a lot of the time I’ve been lacking the inclination too. It’s a side-effect of motherhood that I didn’t expect at all: for well over a decade I’d had a story more or less constantly writing itself in my head – until I had a baby, and it all just – went. It was if my brain had been replaced with someone else’s, someone who didn’t write, and had no interest in writing. Which was just as well, really, because she didn’t have the time and the energy.

Every now and again an idea rushed back in, and I’d get very excited. And either I’d lie awake with a sleeping child in the crook of my elbow and know that if I moved I’d wake her, or by some miracle I’d find an hour and get it written down, and then it would stick there because by the next time I got a free hour there’d be something else that needed doing, or that seemed more fun.

Meanwhile, Smashwords (which I use to distribute the ebook versions of my Stancester books) kept sending me emails about migrating my account to Draft2Digital, which kept reminding me that I’d never sorted out my tax code on there and therefore had (a frankly pitiful amount of) money sitting on my account, and every time I felt irritated and slightly despairing of ever selling any more of my existing books, let alone ever finishing a new one. 2020 – the last time I published a book – was getting longer and longer ago, and I was feeling less and less like the person who’d done it.

Then one lunchtime I went to the Wellcome Collection. They had an exhibition of zines, mostly by disabled people. They talked about how zines are amateur, scruffy, don’t have to be perfect. In the corner was a table with paper and pens and a sign encouraging you to have a go at making your own zine, about saying the things you had to say.

I had things to say, things about grief and loss and memory.

I thought, I could do a zine.

A book still seemed a very long way out of reach, but I could do a zine. Or I could at least try one. I went back to my desk and folded a sheet of A4 paper into eighths. I drew a bus across two of them. A little doggerel quatrain emerged from my mind with barely any trouble at all.

Back at home, I unearthed an A3 pad and started on the real thing. There was a poem I’d written years ago, intended for the eventual Book Bus Stories book, which went straight in. In a charity shop I found a book of photographs of Paris, all chic and moody and monochrome, which, combined with the experience of speedrunning a dozen years of (moody, monochrome) family photographs while preparing for my mother’s funeral, made me think everything looks better in black and white, and then, everything looks sadder in black and white. That became a piece.

I photocopied several pages of my father’s Paris Is Well Worth A Bus and, after several false starts, got a reasonable blackout poem down.

I stuck down a Kimberley Ales beermat and an Artichaut de Bretagne sticker to make wheels. I got out the Dymo machine.

The cat trod on the paper while I was working on it and I remembered my father yelling “Trolloper!” at her; I drew a cloud around the pawprint and wrote about how it helps and hurts to remember things like that.

I filled in the body of the bus, the platform, the window frames. I thought I was done. Then I went to Gay’s The Word (on a bit of a weepy high because the General Synod of the Church of England had finally done away with Issues in Human Sexuality as a requirement for ordinands), picked up Joe Brainard’s I Remember, read about twenty pages, and knew that I needed to fill in all the white space with the things I don’t remember.

On Friday I took the whole thing to the library and did a photocopy by way of a test. It looked great. (Everything does, in fact, look better in black and white.) I took it to the print shop and got a proper print run (fifty, in fact) done. Then I took the whole lot home and, over the weekend and today, cut and folded the lot into booklets. Now they’re packed in a box, ready to go down to Ventnor Fringe and the Book Bus with me tomorrow. It’s a good feeling.

I made a zine. It’s not perfect. And it’s not a book. But it’s good enough, and it turns out that good enough is actually great.

December Reflections 3: remembering

kathleenjowitt1 Comment
A framed watercolour painting of a building on an island in a mirror, a framed prayer by Robert Louis Stevenson illustrated with a photo of an angel carved in stone, and a brass rubbing (only partly visible) hang next a door

In the introduction to my copy of Virginia Woolf’s The Years, Jeri Johnson draws attention to the way that certain pieces of furniture reappear in different settings through the book – the sort of thing it’s easy to do in film, but which requires considerable skill to pull off in a novel. I’ve been thinking of this a lot as I try to assimilate objects and artworks from my late father’s house into my own. Sometimes it’s been a bit of a challenge – twenty-first century walls are not, on the whole, tall enough to give nineteenth century portraits the breathing room they deserve – but this little prayer fits beautifully next our front door.

In Pa’s house (smaller than this one, and certainly fuller) it was clamped onto the end of a bookcase. It hung in the bathroom at the house before. And at the house before that, I’m pretty sure. I don’t know about the one before that; I was only four. Reading it over and over, it’s sunk into my head. I know it by heart, without ever having deliberately set out to learn it.

In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever read this prayer aloud. I would find it difficult to do the play the man bit seriously; when I pray it in my head, which I quite often do when I need a prayer in the morning and can’t remember how the Collect for Grace begins, I can add a mental footnote (‘you know what I mean’). I remember Pa telling me how when he was a child he thought ‘play the man’ referred to a stage role, and ‘perform them’ followed on from that. That’s got me thinking about how nobody (hardly anybody) really gets what ‘performative’ means (me included), but that’s not really the point here.

In my memory I also see it quoted in the visitors’ book – ‘… laughter and kind faces; let cheerfulness abound with industry…’ in the spiky handwriting of a dear departed friend. I don’t remember a huge amount of industry happening in my childhood home (my mother, I am sure, would beg to differ) but it most definitely had its cheerful moments, many of them associated with that very friend.

The angel – you can’t quite see in the photograph of a photograph – is from Southwell. We visited Southwell this summer, but I didn’t think to look for the angel. Nor did we look at the famous Southwell Leaves, which were in a part of the minster that looked a bit daunting to attempt with a pushchair. We did, however, find a memorial to the victims of the Katyn massacre – something we would most definitely have sought out had we known about it, as my husband’s great-grandfather was among those murdered. It brought us up short; we’d only diverted to Southwell to tick another cathedral off the list and find lunch. A surprise – a stop-and-think-for-a-moment – a remembering – keep it alive – keep them alive.

Remembering is an inexact art. Was that prayer really in the bathroom? My memory tried to put it in the bathroom at my father’s last house, too, but I know I unscrewed it from the bookcase myself. I’m getting confused with prayers for washing of hands. Already the family stories blur and swirl. My brother (happy birthday!) went to look for the house where those portraits must have hung, and now it’s a chip shop. Except that was twelve years ago, assuming he went when I assume he did. We write down what we can remember, and then wonder how long the writing survives. Digital decays fast: I shouldn’t be surprised if that framed prayer outlives this blog. As for the memory that goes with it, that’s another question. In the long view, it doesn’t really matter. If the prayer survives, it will be because somebody likes it, for the sake of its associations (my father, me, Southwell, who knows) or for its own. In the meantime, I see it as I put my shoes and coat on and prepare to leave the house:

Give us to go blithely on our business all this day, and bring us to our resting beds weary and content and undishonoured, and grant us in the end the gift of sleep.